Honor 7A + 7C bring face unlock to the sub-£170 price point

When you're selling a phone for less than £200, you need to be very careful about which corners you cut. This price point is rife with devices that choose the wrong compromises, and it's this which Huawei's Honor brand is set to counter with its new Honor 7A and 7C phones, selling for £139.99 and £169.99 respectively.

Both devices borrow heavily from the design language of the Honor 8 Pro and View 10 with curved metal adorning the 7C, and a metallic-effect plastic covering the 7A. And there are a few significant firsts in these phones: They're the first Android phones we're aware of at this price that pack 18:9 panels, giving more display real estate than rivals, and face recognition, a feature largely limited to flagship handsets at present. In our brief time testing the face unlock feature, we found it worked pretty well, though understandably it lacked the speed of high-end implementations, as found in the P20 Pro and Honor View 10.

The other big compromise is display resolution: While the screens are 18:9 panels, you'll need to make do with HD+ resolution, meaning 720p and change, on both models. The displays actually don't look bad considering the price point, and both were bright enough for clear daylight visibility, with vibrant colors. Still, the lack of pixel density is noticeable.

The 7C boasts extra RAM and storage, as well as dual cameras, for an extra £30.

The 7C also features a dual rear camera setup, which is common in mid-rangers, but pretty rare in entry-level phones. In some casual testing ahead of today's launch, the 7C's dual 13-megapixel-plus-2-megapixel setup. In the Honor 7A, you'll miss out on the depth-sensing tricks offered by the second camera. Neither phone skimps on battery capacity, though, with 3,000mAh cells included and considering the efficient Snapdragon 430 and 450 processors used in the 7A and 7C, that bodes really well for battery life.

We're a little more concerned about the RAM situation on the 7A -- Android can run on the 2GB included, but whether it'll run well once it gets loaded up with apps is another matter. By the same token, that 16GB of internal storage will likely have you offloading some apps to your SD card before long.

Both phones come equipped with Huawei's EMUI 8 firmware, though, based on Android 8.0, and the software is kitted out with the same performance-saving AI features found in Huawei's flagship devices. Out of the box, EMUI runs smoothly on both devices, and the software we played with ahead of launch seems to include some more recent fixes from the P20 as well. Specifically, the annoying "app running in background" message no longer displays for music apps, and lock screen notifications can be expanded.

Besides that, this is EMUI, just as we've seen it on many other Huawei and Honor phones, only now powered by a Snapdragon processor as opposed to Huawei's Kirin line. All in all, a solid experience, though with some customizations that may upset Android purists.

Category

Honor 7A

Honor 7C

Operating System

Android 8.0, EMUI 8.0

Android 8.0, EMUI 8.0

Processor

Snapdragon 430

Snapdragon 450

RAM/Storage

2GB/16GB

3GB/32GB

microSD

Yes

Yes (dual-SIM triple slot)

Battery

3,000mAh non-removable

3,000mAh non-removable

Display

5.99-inch HD+ LCD, 18:9 aspect ratio

5.7-inch HD+ LCD, 18:9 aspect ratio

Front camera

8MP with soft light

8MP with soft light

Rear cameras

13MP + 2MP (mono)

13MP

Headphone jack

Yes

Yes

Fingerprint scanner

Rear

Rear

Face recognition

Yes

Yes

Price

£139.99

£169.99

The Honor 7A will sell for £139.99 outright when it launches in May, and it'll be available through Honor's own HiHonor.com store, as well as Three UK on contract. The 7C will launch exclusively through HiHonor the same month, priced £169.99.